The 1970s were a golden age for strong female heroines. The year after Wonder Woman came out on CBS, ABC fought back and released The Bionic Woman, starring Lindsay Wagner as super-strong spy Jamie Sommers. Not to be outdone, in 1976 CBS also released Charlie’s Angels, the saga of three female police officers who quit their boring, sexist assignments to become private investigators.

The shows weren’t exactly perfect feminist artifacts. All their heroines were constructed — and dressed — for the male gaze and male viewers. But at 11 and 12, I only cared that I saw powerful, smart, independent women.

Wonder Woman, though, held a special place in my heart. Not only was she strong and brilliant and brave, but she was played by a curvaceous Latina actress with curly black hair. I couldn’t identify with blonde and willlowy Lindsay Wagner (the Bionic Woman) or Farah Fawcett-Majors (perhaps Charlie’s most famous angel). But if I squinted hard, I could just about see myself in Carter’s magic bracelets and gravity-defying bustier.

Wonder Woman’s subversive feminist origins are real enough. She was the brainchild of William Moulton Marston, a psychologist with a PhD from Harvard who also invented the first lie detector — our real-life version of Wonder Woman’s Lasso of Truth. Marston lived in a polyamorous relationship with two outspoken feminists — Elizabeth Holloway Marston, a lawyer, and Olive Byrne, a journalist and one of Marston’s former students. (Byrne just happened to be the niece of crusading birth control pioneer Margaret Sanger, the founder of Planned Parenthood.)

Together, in 1941, the three dreamt up Wonder Woman and her island of Amazons, where fierce warrior women lived in a paradise without men.

“Frankly, Wonder Woman is psychological propaganda for the new type of woman who should, I believe, rule the world,” Marston once said.

But in the new Wonder Woman movie, which opened Friday in Edmonton, the kitschy camp of the Wonder Woman I grew up with is gone. The TV show filled me with the sort of joy that had me jumping on and off the chesterfield in my parents’ rumpus room and spinning around with my arms outstretched, in the hopes that when my glasses fell off and my pony-tail came down, I too would be both gorgeous and invincible.

This Wonder Woman, as played by Israeli actress Gal Gadot and directed by Patty Jenkins, is both more innocent and more terrifying. She’s Diana Prince, an Amazon princess, who’s prowling the grim and grimy streets of 1918 London, and the trenches of the Belgian battlefields, on a mission to find and destroy Ares, the god of war. It’s an origin story that is one part Greek myth and one part Paradise Lost, with a sprinkling of The Tempest and a soupcon of multicultural Magnificent Seven.

The film’s feminism isn’t subtext. It’s front-and-centre. And it’s funny. Diana, arriving in London in the company of American secret agent Steve Trevor, finds the fashions of 1918 London constricting and absurd. She finds its constricting gender roles and sexual mores equally ridiculous. The Amazons, she informs the gobsmacked Trevor (played by Chris Pine) have determined that men are not necessary for sexual pleasure. But she’s happy to stare at his naked body in frank appreciation, and happy to share a bed with him, too, without any coy hesitation.

But what grounds this movie is that Diana isn’t battling space aliens or super villains. Instead, she’s confronting the real-life First World War brutalities of trench warfare and mustard gas.

She’s not afraid to charge a German machine-gun nest to liberate a village. Her far greater challenge is overcoming her own revulsion at the flawed human beings she meets, as she has to decide whether humans are actually worth saving, or whether the planet might indeed be better off without them.

Chris Pine as Steve Trevor and Gal Gadot as Diana Prince in an image from Wonder Woman. Trevor tries to put glasses on Diana to help her blend in. It doesn’t work.Clay Enos /
AP

In the end, her heroism isn’t physical. It’s moral. She triumphs not through brute force, but by making an emotional connection to the broken, imperfect human specimens she encounters.

This is a Wonder Woman film for the Trump era. A parable about the dangers of isolationism and appeasement in the face of a government that uses chemical weapons against civilians. A tragedy that tells us the Devil isn’t an external bogeyman, but the darkness and selfishness within.

Gadot’s Wonder Woman offers a feminist role model for an age of resistance. A heroine who inspires us not to jump and spin, but to act in the face of injustice.

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